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To Sanctify Falsehood
"To Sanctify Falsehood" was a Special Comment delivered online on 12 May 2011, thirty-nine days prior to the debut of Countdown with Keith Olbermann on Current TV. The Comment The quickest way for a nation to ruin itself is to sanctify falsehood. And the quickest way to sanctify falsehood, is to attack anyone who even asks if it's falsehood. I do not have a problem with this country dispatching a shoot-to-kill team to get Osama Bin Laden. The impracticality of a trial - the prospect of hostage-taking, or other attempts to free a living and captured Bin Laden - are compelling reasons to do what was done. Even on the philosophical and legal levels, there are reasons to believe that Bin Laden was not a mere state-less terrorist, but the self-proclaimed leader of an entity of some kind, a virtual, if not mapped, nation which had declared war on the United States. I do not think you can imprison the equivalent of soldiers of that conflict, indefinitely, without trial. But the leader of that entity? I think there is much evidence that you can shoot him, the way we shot him. What I object to, is those who want to silence those who disagree with me. My friend Michael Moore told CNN, quote, "We've lost something of our soul here in this country. Maybe I'm just an old-school American who believes in our judicial system. We're better than them, we don't just operate in an uncivilized way the way they did on 9/11." Michael's points are right-on. More over, only someone who had deliberately forgotten the last decade would think that our shooting Bin Laden won't be used as an excuse by somebody somewhere for shooting an American - and soon. I believe, with great regret, that the pragmatic circumstances of keeping Bin Laden alive outweighed, very narrowly, what Michael is addressing. But for him to then be accused of "intellectual liberal hand-wringing" by a supposedly liberal commentator on a supposedly liberal television network, is outrageous. Further, to suggest that those hoping to keep to the ideals of this nation - even if it was impractical to apply them here, even if Michael Moore was wrong - to suggest that those hoping to keep to the ideals of this nation preferred a route that would have gotten President Obama impeached, is farcical, and beyond the pale, and calls into doubt not Moore's point-of-view, but the willingness of his critics to permit the questioning of the proverbial official story. Some of us - not enough - questioned the official story in 2002 and 2003. But few of us who did so, had as much to lose as did Michael Moore. We were accused of "intellectual liberal hand-wringing" - even by supposedly liberal commentators on supposedly liberal television networks. We were dismissed, and demonized. And to this day, even though Michael Moore was right, and George Bush was wrong, and even though Michael Moore was right, and Newt Gingrich was wrong, and even though Michael Moore was right, and John Boehner was wrong - to this day it is Moore who is demonized by the Republican Cult in ways that Bush and Gingrich and Boehner are not demonized by the American Left. Instead, Moore, himself, now gets demonized in part, by the American left. I want Michael Moore to question everything. I want him even to repeat the ten tweets he had in the aftermath of the killing of Bin Laden, in which he picked up on his theme from three years ago, when he told Larry King that the story that Bin Laden was living in caves, moving from one to the other, was palpable nonsense, that the only millionaire who willingly lived in a cave was Batman, and he only went there to change costumes. I want Michael Moore, and every other Michael Moore, to remind us that, indeed, "Pakistan just couldn't be seen as participating with us" and that, indeed, "the story has changed four times now in four days" and that, indeed, "As long as he wasn't conducting terror, Osama Bin Laden alive served a purpose. Someone should just fess up: the war industry needs fear to make (money)." There doesn't have to be a conspiracy for those details to be true. You don't have to agree with Michael Moore, to thank him for reminding us of them. Yet or what he said on one television network, Moore was upbraided on another, accused of doubting that the Navy Seals were trained enough to know whether or not they were in danger, and of, quote, "dissing" them. On May 8th, 2003, I became the first person on cable news to even refer to a report in the newspaper The Toronto Star which had revealed that a U-S Commando raid in Iraq was not only not what Central Command had claimed it had been, but that it was not necessary at all. It was the quote "rescue" unquote of the injured and captured Private Jessica Lynch - an event now considered a symbol of the lies, exaggerations, and propaganda of The Bush Administration. I was accused of "liberal hand-wringing." I was accused of doubting that the Commandos had been trained enough to know whether or not they were in danger. Demands were made that I apologize to the servicemen. And I did so. Because, since I had not insulted them any more than Michael Moore had insulted the Seals who went in for Bin Laden, I saw, in underscoring this point, a wonderful opportunity to tell of the falsehood of the Lynch story again. Do we want to go back to the way the media was in this country eight years and four days ago? That to question the honesty of those in power is to find oneself painted as unpatriotically questioning the troops? Because that is where Michael Moore's critics would lead us. I want hand-wringing over exactly who a President gets to kill. I want Liberals to question other Liberals. If the official story deviates at all from the facts, I want the official story questioned. Michael Moore is damned good at questioning official stories and should be encouraged to do so, even at the risk of offending some liberals of uncertain provenance. Because I'd rather have one question too many than one too few and because while the Official Story is always "official" it is not always more than just "a story." See Also Category:2011 Special Comments